Falsifiability and the Meaning of Genesis One

Thomas Pittman, PhD

San Jose, CA

Abstract

This paper applies the scientific concept of falsifiability to propositions
about the author's intent concerning Creation Week in the first chapter
of Genesis. A simple but robust proof is given to show that it was the
Biblical author's intent to teach a 144-hour duration for Creation Week,
and that assertions to the contrary are either false or meaningless.

This paper was presented at the West Coast meeting of the Evangelical
Theological Society in 1996.

Falsifiability

Falsifiability is the essence of the Scientific Method. The working scientist
proposes a hypothesis (a proposition or putative statement of fact concerning
some aspect of his area of research), then devises one or more experiments
designed to show the hypothesis to be false, if indeed it is false. Alternatively,
the scientist may adopt some hypothesis already proposed by others in his
field, but still devise experiments designed to show it to be false. The
hypothesis that withstands this assault is promoted to the status of "theory"
and eventually to "law of nature." However, to qualify as a working hypothesis,
the proposition must be falsifiable, that is, it must be possible to devise
experiments that in principle could show it to be false, even if in fact
they fail to do so. A proposition that is not falsifiable is considered
meaningless for scientific purposes; it may offer insight concerning some
inner religious or psychological state of the speaker, but it says nothing
about the real world that is the domain of science.

Consider the proposition, "The title of this paper contains no word
five letters long." This statement is falsifiable, because we can devise
experiments with at least one conceivable outcome that proves the statement
false. One such experiment would be to examine the title of this paper,
counting the letters in the first and last words. If either of these two
words is five letters in length, the proposition has been falsified. That
is a conceivable outcome, so the statement is falsifiable. However, when
we perform the experiment and count the letters in these two words, we
encounter lengths of 14 and 3. Neither of these is five, so the statement
is not falsified by this experiment. However, it has also not been proved
true, because there are other words in the title that were not examined
by this experiment, and one of them could still be five letters long. Scientific
experiments generally only establish a hypothesis as false, or fail to
establish anything at all. Some other scientist could always come along
with yet another experiment that succeeds in falsifying a hypothesis that
has so far withstood all challenges.

Consider now the proposition, "Two plus two equals four." There is no
experiment that can be devised with a conceivable outcome in which this
is false. It is not falsifiable. We call a proposition that is necessarily
true as this one is, a "tautology." Tautologies are valuable tools for
studying mathematical and logical reasoning methods, but they tell us nothing
about the real world.

Then there is the proposition, "Joe feels good." While this may be true
or false at a particular point in time, no experiment can unequivocally
prove it false. Try the experiment consisting of looking to see if Joe
is smiling. If he is, perhaps it is because he heard a good joke; if not,
does that prove Joe does not feel good? What if Joe is a Puritan, who may
feel good inside but is not allowed to signal this feeling to the world
by smiling? Statements about feelings are generally considered not falsifiable.
From a scientific perspective they are meaningless.

We could continue to look at varieties of propositions to further explore
the concept of falsifiability, but it would not greatly improve our understanding
for the subject of this paper. Let me mention only historical statements,
which may be true or false but the experiments to falsify them must often
be inferential, because one cannot turn back the clock to better examine
the attendant circumstances.

Linguistic Falsifiability

I now propose for your consideration, a variation on the issue of falsifiability,
applied to propositions about a written text. The text most often considered
among evangelicals is the Bible, and its great age poses special problems
for falsifiability testing.

When I studied Greek, the instructor was an advanced student who rather
cleverly (so I thought at the time) reasoned that learning all the noun
and verb paradigms was unnecessary; it was sufficient only to learn to
recognize the distinguishing characteristics of each form. I now consider
that a mistake: the classical rote and drill method is better. The reason
is falsifiability.

When you look at a Greek verb in context, one of the questions you might
ask is, "Is the tense of this verb aorist or imperfect?" The imperfect
tense would suggest repeated or continuing action, while the aorist would
not carry that meaning. Thus the broader question, "Did the author intend
to communicate continuing action in this sentence?" is falsifiable and
meaningful, for it can be falsified by the "experiment" that determines
the tense of the verb, when it turns out to be aorist and not imperfect.
Similarly, the question about the verb tense ("Is this verb in the imperfect
tense?") is falsifiable and meaningful, for it can be falsified by showing
that its form is aorist. Of course to do that you must know what this verb
would look like in the aorist tense, which is where the recognition method
fails.

Let us look at a more specific example of the author's intent, in the
following two sentences:

1. On July 20, 1969, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to set
foot on the moon.

2. Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over
the moon.

Both sentences are patently false, but we are not so much concerned
with that as with the author's intent in writing them. Neither author is
available for questioning, so we can only formulate hypotheses about that
intent and devise "experiments" to test those hypotheses. Here are a some
hypotheses to consider:

a) The author of sentence x intended to write poetry with
no historical significance.

b) The author of sentence x intended to report a fact of
history.

c) The author of sentence x intended to teach a theological
dogma.

Each of these hypotheses is falsifiable, because like the tense of Greek
verbs, we know the respective forms of poetry, historical facts, and theological
dogma. To recognize poetry the analyst looks for rhyme and meter, and (often)
the juxtaposition of words in ways that do not correspond to nature; sentence
(2) is a good example of poetry. To identify modern historical facts the
analyst looks for dates, places, and the names of real people; sentence
(1) fits this description. Theological dogma typically involves God as
subject or object, or else presents moral imperatives; neither of these
sentences fits that description.

Applying hypothesis (b) to sentence (1) presents us with an interesting
dilemma. Because the sentence is known to be false, is it possible that
the author did not intend to offer a fact of history? The form of the sentence
is clearly historical: you need only replace the name "Yuri Gagarin" with
the name "Neil Armstrong" and it becomes a true fact of history. Here we
rely on our external knowledge of history to corroborate or falsify the
hypothesis about the author's intent. When that external knowledge is missing
or in dispute it cannot be used in this way, and we must rely on the other
factors.

It is also rare that one must evaluate the author's intent on an isolated
sentence. Thus a single historical error could be discounted if sentence
(1) were part of a larger historical treatise. On the other hand, if sentence
(1) appeared as one of a collection of false statements, then the historical
intent of the author might more readily be falsified.

Note that in each case we are discussing experiments to falsify hypothesis
(b) as applied to sentence (1). No such experiments are even possible with
hypothesis (d), which may perhaps be true or false, but there is no way
we could verify or falsify it apart from asking the author:

d) The author of sentence x intended to record an encrypted
password to his e-mail account.

Two Propositions about Genesis One

Now we are ready to consider some propositions about Scripture. In the
first chapter of Genesis there is little question about the grammatical
forms used or the lexical meaning of the words. Furthermore, it is placed
in a larger context of historical narrative, and while it does exhibit
some structure, it does not have the form of Hebrew poetry (of which we
have many examples, some of them later in Genesis). I propose now to base
my study of the topic at hand on this solid foundation, rather than on
the shifting sands of scientific cosmogony. The first and most important
question we can ask about these propositions is if they are falsifiable
and therefore meaningful.

Propositions about the duration and recency of the Creation Week recorded
in the first chapter of Genesis are historical in nature, and have been
debated by scholars for centuries. The pair of mutually exclusive propositions,
"The duration of the events reported in Genesis One did not exceed 144
hours" and "The events reported in Genesis One were spread over long
periods of time," are both in principle falsifiable, and many scientists
and theologians have expended much time and effort to devising experiments
for the purpose of falsifying one or the other. I do not intend to add
to that effort at this time. Rather let us consider a pair of second-order
propositions, for which the evidence is simpler and less controversial.

Although these propositions refer to the inner thoughts of a writer
no longer available for questioning, I think we can consider their falsifiability
on the basis of external evidence. Indeed we have no alternative.

Let Proposition A be the statement,
"The author of Genesis intended to teach no particular duration
for Creation Week."

Let Proposition B be the statement,
"The author of Genesis intended to teach a 144-hour duration
for Creation Week."

Clearly, these are mutually exclusive: they cannot both be true in any
meaningful sense. They are not collectively comprehensive because other
propositions, mutually exclusive with both of them, exist. However, most
of the participants in the debate concerning Creation implicitly defend
one of these two only, and attack the other only.

Let us consider in turn the falsifiability of these two propositions.
Any particular claim about an author's intent is most easily shown to be
falsifiable by pointing to words or sentences which the author did not
use, but if they had been used would have communicated the opposite meaning.

Proposition B is falsified by finding that the author used words communicating
a very long duration for Creation Week. It is also falsified by finding
that the author used words communicating no particular duration. The Hebrew
language available to the author of Genesis contains words and constructs
capable of both of these alternate meanings, and the author did not use
either one. An example of words that convey no particular duration of time
occurs in Genesis 4:3: "In the course of time Cain brought some of the
fruits of the soil..." [NIV] Thus Proposition B is falsifiable but not
falsified.

Proposition A is falsified by finding that the author used words communicating
a specific duration for Creation Week, most particularly if that duration
is 144 hours. The Hebrew language available to the author of Genesis contains
no word for our modern concept of a 60-minute hour -- indeed nothing even
closely approximating that concept shows up in the Bible until the time
of Hezekiah (see 2 Kings 20:9-11). We can hardly burden the author of Genesis
with terminology not in his vocabulary, so a transliteration of the English
phrase "144 hours" is out of the question. However, we might expect the
author of Genesis to enumerate atoms of the finest granularity of time
available in his language to denote a specific time, as for example, "there
was evening and there was morning, the sixth day." The author of Genesis,
it would appear, did use an enumeration of that finest granularity.

Alternatively, we might expect a falsification of Proposition A to consist
in putting the events of Creation Week into a one-to-one relationship with
a period incontestably of a specific (and short) duration, such as the
Sabbath week in the Law of Moses. As a mathematician by training, I note
that one-to-one correspondence is exactly the modern mathematical proof
for establishing a specific enumeration. It is unnecessary here for me
to resurrect the debate over the meaning of day in Hebrew as it occurs
in the first chapter of Genesis; it is sufficient to find exactly that
one-to-one correspondence in the Ten Commandments: "For in six days the
LORD made the heavens and the earth..." [Ex.20:11, NIV] Whether Moses was
also the author of Genesis or not, his clear intent was to bind the Sabbath
week to the six days of creation, and furthermore to specifically limit
that to the standard 144 hours of the laboring man's week. Otherwise the
man found gathering wood on the Sabbath day [Num.15:32-36] would have had
a perfect defense for his life: "The Law, 'Six [indefinite] periods of
time you shall labor' is for me ten years to a 'day' so I'm still working
on my fourth day. When I am 60 years old, I will take a ten-year Sabbath
rest." God and Moses did not see it that way.

Every possible wording for falsifying Proposition A that I can think
of, within the vocabulary available to the author of Genesis, has already
been used in the sacred text. Thus we are forced to conclude either that
Proposition A is not falsifiable and therefore meaningless (except perhaps
to give us some insight about the internal feelings of its proponents),
or else it is falsifiable and false.

Conclusions

This leaves us with a rather robust conclusion: The author of Genesis did
intend to teach a particular duration for Creation Week, and that duration
is best described by the simple unambiguous modern phrase, "144 hours."
Any denial of this conclusion is either illogical or inconsistent with
the evidence.

It is important to recognize, however, that the force of the logic I
have presented here says nothing at all about whether the duration of Creation
Week was actually 144 hours, but only that the author of Genesis intended
to say it was. We must fall back on other means -- specifically the principle
of inerrancy -- to determine the actual duration of Creation Week. But
I leave that debate to the scientists and theologians,
in one or the other of whose domains it properly lies.

Notes

I prefer the phrase "144 hours" to "six days" because
of the ambiguity introduced into the latter term by the so-called "day-age"
theory. Once a term has been corrupted by verbal double-speak, it can no
longer be used unambiguously in debate. Another example of this occurred
in recent time when the new term "inerrant" became necessary to refer to
what the traditional term "inspired" had formerly meant before it was corrupted
by theologians opposed to the orthodox doctrine to which it referred.

About the Author

Thomas Pittman received his BA in mathematics at Berkeley, and his MS and
PhD in Information Science at the University of California in Santa Cruz.
He also spent two eclectic years at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
studying Greek, Hebrew, systematics, apologetics, etc. Apart from a 3-year
position on the faculty of Kansas State University, he has spent most of
his career developing custom and commercial computer software. He is currently
Vice President of Magnify Software, a small software firm in San Jose.